The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore ed. by Jeffery W. Vail (review)

Literary critics, historians, and biographers owe a great debt to responsible editors of collected editions, especially of an author’s letters. And the best editors, such as Jeffery Vail, are clever enough to find many new letters that increase our knowledge of an author’s life and works. In this case, Vail offers an edition of 1,435 carefully edited letters written by Thomas Moore (1779–1852), 806 of which are previously unpublished. The bulk of the other previously “published” but often overlooked letters are 484 excerpts from Moore’s letters taken from the New York 1854 edition of Notes from the Letters of Thomas Moore to his Music Publisher, James Power (a rare book now available on Google Books and Hathi Trust), which contains letters that Vail “corrected, rearranged, annotated and placed … in their appropriate chronological order” (i, x). Those who have worked with these letters to Power will welcome Vail’s efforts on their and Moore’s behalf.

Vail enters the history of editing Moore’s letters after two less-than-successful ventures that have often misled scholars: Lord John Russell’s eight-volume Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore (1853–56); and Wilfred S. Dowden’s two-volume Letters of Thomas Moore (1964). Vail’s new edition supplements (and sometimes corrects) these two editions, but both still need to be consulted (together with Dowden’s badly indexed and not always reliable six-volume Journal of Thomas Moore [1983–91], which also contains drafts of letters). Vail informs me that he proposes a website that will eventually contain all of Moore’s letters, newly corrected, in one sequential and searchable order (including at least twenty-five additional letters he has discovered since publishing this Pickering & Chatto edition in 2013).

The digital age now offers many such web sites for research: e.g., “The Collected Letters of Robert Southey” <http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters>; the Shelley-Godwin Archive <http://shelleygodwinarchive.org>; William Godwin’s Diary <http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>; “Lord Byron and His Times” <http://lordbyron.cath.lib.vt.edu>; and Byron’s Correspondence <http://petercochran.wordpress.com/byron-2/byron>. But we still welcome the more traditional letterpress efforts of Pamela Clemit’s new multivolume edition of The Letters of William Godwin (2011–) and of Nora Crook’s “Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley” (published in last year’s K-SJ). I am preparing a new edition of the “Collected Letters of William Hazlitt” that should be ready in another two years, an edition that will add substantially to and correct the frequent errors in the Sikes edition of Hazlitt’s letters (NYU Press, 1978). We know that many nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century editions of letters are often suspect (with editors irresponsibly combining separate letters into one or silently deleting words, phrases, and paragraphs), but we also should know that an edition postdating 1940 and/or published by a university press does not guarantee accuracy and/or completeness: witness Frederick L. Jones’s edition of Mary Shelley’s Journal (University of Oklahoma Press, 1947); or consult James H. Merrell’s recent cautionary “‘Exactly as they appear’…” in the Winter 2014 issue of Early American Studies that questions the reliability of scholarship based on poorly edited texts—he asks: “Are we building our interpretive houses on sand?” (237).

Vail offers firm footing for future scholars who will find in these two volumes fully articulated editorial principles, accurate transcriptions, good annotations, useful front matter with a chronology and short biographies of the major figures, and a comprehensive name and title index. Most readers of this review will use the index to find specific information on other writers or works, but I benefited by reading the edition from cover to cover and learned a great deal about Moore’s personal and professional lives. In effect, the letters and annotations put a human face (and fashionable clothes and boots) on...